Pro Tools: How To Work With Playlists

A guitar solo, comped using playlists. The pink track has been ‘promoted’ to be the main playlist (which you hear when the track plays back), and a section from playlist 04 has been inserted into it.

Playlists are the key to managing takes, comping, and much more! Let's explore...

In Pro Tools, many of the most useful features aren’t recent additions, but quietly solid tools that have been there for years. Playlists are a perfect example. They’re not new. They’re not exclusive to Pro Tools. But if you record or edit in Pro Tools and you’re not using them properly, you’re almost certainly making your life harder than it needs to be.

Pro Tools playlists allow you to manage multiple takes or alternative versions on a single track, without any unnecessary duplicating. It’s the feature that underpins everything from vocal comping to ADR to guitar solos and multi‑mic drum sessions. Recent updates have added support for MIDI playlists too — a long‑requested feature that finally brings parity between audio and MIDI workflows in this area.

In this article, we’ll look at what playlists are, how they’re used, and why they’re still one of the most valuable tools in Pro Tools for producers, engineers and editors.

A playlist in Pro Tools is basically a version of a track’s contents. Each track has a main playlist, which is what you see and hear by default, but you can also create as many alternate playlists as you like. Each one is a full version of the track’s timeline, complete with clips, edits and fades.

Playlists are most commonly used to manage alternate takes, whether captured during recording or created as part of an editing process. Instead of duplicating tracks or muting clips, you can simply create a new playlist for each take and switch between them as needed.

The beauty of playlists is that they live within the track. There’s no clutter in your session. No duplicated inserts or sends. No reassigning outputs. Just clean, contained organisation...

The beauty of playlists is that they live within the track. There’s no clutter in your session. No duplicated inserts or sends. No reassigning outputs. Just clean, contained organisation that scales well whether you’re working with a single vocal or 20 tracks of layered guitars.

Creating & Managing Playlists

One scenario where playlists can be invaluable is when you want to try out an edit to see whether it works. Rather than relying on the Undo feature, or saving an alternate version of your session, you can just duplicate the content of your main playlist to a new playlist and edit it there. If it turns out to be a bad decision, you can simply revert back to the original playlist.

To create a new playlist, click the Playlist selector in the track header (that’s the drop‑down that shows the track name by default) and choose ‘New’. Alternatively, you can use the shortcut Control+\ (Mac) or Start+\ (Windows)....